In addition to being employed for peacetime trade and transportation, river-craft were also used for warfare. The frontline vessel in both Shihuangdi’s campaign against the Hundred Yue and Wudi’s invasion of Jiaozhi a century later was the louchuan, or towered ship. Based on interpretations of the images on Dong-Son drums and Chinese bronzes from the fourth century BCE, these seem to have been decked vessels of twenty to twentyfive meters in length, propelled by forward-facing rowers stationed below, and fought by archers and soldiers armed with dagger axes and bows stationed above deck and in the towers. The main antiship weapons were fifteen-meter-long beams mounted on pivots, a design not unlike the Roman corvus but intended simply to smash enemy ships to pieces rather than to hold them fast for a boarding action.
The largest of the ships from the Dunhuang cave complex in Gansu Province, central China, about 2,300 kilometers from the nearest saltwater. The Buddhist ship of faith sailing from the shores of illusion to the paradise of Amitabha (Amida) Buddha has the square ends typical of Tang Dynasty ships, but the square sail suggests an Indian or Indian Ocean point of reference. Courtesy of the RMN–Grand Palais, Paris/Art Resource, New York.
It is doubtful that such weapons were used in the campaigns against Jiaozhi or the Korean Peninsula, the fleets for which likely comprised only armed troop transports. Whether they would have encountered vessels specifically designed for combat is difficult to know, for while the kingdom of Silla established an office of maritime administration (Seonbuseo) responsible for civilian and naval shipping in the sixth century, references to and archaeological finds of individual ships on the Korean Peninsula, as well as in Japan, are few. According to the Nihongi (which was compiled in the eighth century and may include anachronisms that reflect the authors’ experience), the gods who introduced shipbuilding to Japan specified the use of Japanese cedar and camphorwood. The need for water transport was dictated by Japan’s rugged terrain and the availability of coastal routes, but the throne may have had an interest in developing a fleet for trade or warfare early on. Emperor Sujin Tenno (third or fourth century) reportedly mandated that ships be built in all the coastal provinces of his realm, and the ships accidentally burned by the envoys from Silla in 300 CE were said to have been given to the throne as tribute from the provinces in exchange for gifts of salt, while another passage refers to a vessel being “enrolled among the number of Imperial vessels.” How big these were or how they were constructed is unknown. One entry in the Nihongi mentions a ship built from a large tree, which might suggest a logboat of some sort, but another tells of the construction of a ship of thirty meters, which is indicative of a vessel of more complex design. These are only tantalizing hints of robust maritime cultures whose particulars do not come into sharp relief for several centuries.
The inland origins of the Chinese state did not predispose its people to maritime pursuits, but the exploitation of rivers and canals facilitated territorial expansion and domestic stability, while accumulated wealth enabled members of the elite to import exotic goods, the most extraordinary of which came from Southeast Asia. The exposure to alien ideas that resulted from these exchanges was anathema to Confucianists, but the rise of Buddhism and the resulting demand for religious texts, statuary, incense, and other religious paraphernalia spurred trade not only with Southeast Asia and India but also Korea and Japan, where Buddhism was introduced from China. Initially the sea route between China, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean wound through a series of small, loosely defined coastal and island networks, but when fifth-century mariners began crossing the South China Sea from the Strait of Malacca to Vietnam, they inaugurated the longest sailing routes the world would know for the next millennium and ensured the spectacular growth in long-distance trade that flourished in the early centuries of the Islamic caliphates and China’s Tang Dynasty.
a The northeast monsoon (September–November to April) averages about Force 4 (11–16 knots) south of 10ºN, Force 6 (22–27 knots) in the Luzon Strait between the Philippines and Taiwan, and Force 5 in the north; in December and January, Force 7 (28–33 knots) conditions are common from Vietnam to Japan. The southwest monsoon (May–June to August–September) averages Force 3 or 4 (7–16 knots) throughout the region, although squalls are not uncommon.
b The Chinese apply the name Yangzi only to the lower reaches of the river they call Changjiang, meaning “long river.”
c The Pearl River (Zhu Jiang) refers both to the short, wide river that passes the port of Guangzhou, as well as a larger network of the Zhu Jiang’s tributaries including the Xi (West), Bei (North), and Dong (East) Rivers.
d The Han Dynasty is divided into the Former Han, 202 BCE to 2 ce, and the Latter Han, 25 to 220 ce. A cousin of one of the last Former Han emperors ruled in the interval.
e Cash were copper coins minted with a hole in the center; a string of a thousand cash was a standard unit of currency.
Chapter 8
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The Christian and Muslim Mediterranean
Maritime life in the medieval Mediterranean was shaped by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the rise to power of the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic caliphates, and the emergence of religious ideology in political conflict. Disputes over heresies undermined the cohesion of the Byzantine Empire in the seventh century and the resulting stresses are reflected in diminished activity that led to truncated or abandoned shipping routes, and fewer and smaller ships. In its weakened state, the empire was unable to prevent the expansion of Islam in the Levant, whose seafaring communities helped carry the new faith west. Muslim states’ encouragement of industry, trade, and the arts revitalized existing port cities of North Africa and gave rise to new ones, and emirates of the eighth and ninth centuries ruled most of the major islands from Cyprus to the Balearics. In the tenth century, rivalries between Shiites and Sunnis contributed to the loss of Muslim territories to Christian princes. The outstanding long-term change, however, was the gradual decline of the maritime primacy of Egypt, the Levant, and the Aegean, which had constituted the fulcrum of the Mediterranean for millennia. In their place arose commercial and naval powers—Muslim giving way to Christian—that emerged from almost complete obscurity in the central and western Mediterranean.
These developments were accompanied by a major transition in naval architecture as Mediterranean shipwrights abandoned shell-first for frame-first hull construction, a process more economical in material, labor, skill, and time and that ultimately gave rise to the ships that launched European mariners into the Atlantic and beyond. Interfaith conflict posed real obstacles to trade and led to the most intense period of Mediterranean naval warfare since the end of republican Rome. Even so, merchants’ efforts to reconcile different religious and legal principles among Jews, Christians, and Muslims fostered the creation of novel forms of financing commerce, the spread of legal practices designed to protect merchant shippers and their investments, and the forging of compromise solutions to which all could subscribe, regardless of faith. Eventually, this nascent international law fostered further commercial expansion within and beyond the Mediterranean.
Through a Glass Darkly: The Serçe Limani Wreck and the Medieval Mediterranean
In 1973, archaeologists discovered the remains of an eleventh-century merchant ship in the Turkish harbor of Serçe Limani about twelve miles north of Rhodes. The ballast of the “glass wreck” included about three tons of cullet—broken and raw glass—along with a striking array of other goods, ship’s gear, tools, weapons, and personal possessions. What prompted archaeologists to focus on the Serçe Limani site before turning to other known shipwrecks was the ship’s date and the possibility that it might show whether shipwrights had begun to construct ships frame-first rather than in the ancient shell-first sequence, that is, by fastening hull planking to a preerected skeleton of keel and ribs, the method most familiar in western shipbuilding for the past five hundred years. As it happens, the find at Serçe Limani is the latest of three shipwrecks clustered in s
outhwest Turkey through which we can trace the transition from shell-first to frame-first shipbuilding. The two other ships were located off the island of Yassi Ada, about sixty-five miles by sea to the southeast. The older Yassi Ada B wreck dates from the second half of the fourth century. With a length of almost nineteen meters and a beam of less than seven, the ship was of typical shell-first construction, with edge-joined planks fastened to one another by mortise-and-tenon joints and reinforced with frames inserted after the hull was formed. While there is nothing novel in the hull’s construction, Yassi Ada B is thus far the oldest known Mediterranean ship likely to have been rigged with a fore-and-aft sail.
From the south side of the island, the seventh-century Yassi Ada A ship (so-called because it was found before the older Yassi Ada B site) belongs to a transitional shipbuilding phase. In the lower part of the hull the shipwrights edge-joined the planks in the shell-first manner, but the mortise-and-tenon joints were unpegged and widely spaced, a less elaborate joinery than that found in older vessels. Above the waterline, they simply nailed the strakes to existing frames, some of which they fastened to the keel with iron bolts before fitting the planks. Quarter rudders were mounted between two beams that ran the width of the hull aft, and the helmsman probably steered from a raised helm-deck. Archaeologists also identified hatches forward and amidships. The hull is surprisingly slender for a cargo vessel, 21 meters long by 5.2 meters. Some believe that this reflects a renewed interest in speed to outrun pirates, although there could have been an economic rationale for faster ships. Nothing of the rig survives, but given the hull shape and the probable placement of the mainmast and quarter rudders the ship would have sailed best with a two-masted, lateen rig rather than a square sail.
The Serçe Limani ship probably measured 16 by 5 meters, with a depth in hold of nearly 2.5 meters—tall enough to stand up in—and a loaded draft of about 1.4 meters. There is no clue as to where the ship originated, but the keel is of elm and the planking of pine. One of the more curious aspects of the ship’s overall construction is that the shipwrights shaped the timbers with saws rather than axes and adzes, the shipbuilder’s tools of choice worldwide. There were about forty framing stations in the ship, with frames or half frames fastened to the keel with iron nails, and the planks were fastened to the frames with nails and wooden treenails; there is no evidence for any edge-joining of planks. The boxy, thirty-five-ton hull was designed for maximum capacity and the ship apparently carried a two-masted, lateen rig.
When, where, and why shipwrights realized that one could erect a hull’s frame around a centerline keel and then attach planks to the frames are questions not answered in any contemporary sources. Most modern discussion attributes this technological change to the wrenching economic transformations that roiled the Mediterranean between the third and eleventh centuries: the barbarian invasions and division of the Roman Empire; decades of plague in the sixth century; the conflict between the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim caliphates; and sectarian violence within Christianity and Islam. This was not an era of uninterrupted decline, and there were periods of dazzling brilliance and prosperity across the Mediterranean. Yet Rome’s Pax Mediterraneana—an historically anomalous period in which there was almost no conflict at sea—was a thing of the past. With less state support of maritime commerce, the inherent uncertainties of sea trade discouraged investment in large, expensive ships, and it behooved merchant-owners of relatively modest means to run ships that were small and easy to build. These comparatively inexpensive frame-first hulls also gave smaller polities such as the Italian city-states the opportunity to develop niche trades in which they could compete against more established maritime powers.
Whereas the shell-first sequence requires considerable skill at all stages of construction, frame-first lends itself to a more hierarchical workforce; the most skilled shipwrights were responsible for erecting the keel, stem-and sternposts, and frames; fixing the planks to a skeleton frame required less experience; and caulking the seams between planks entailed no knowledge of carpentry at all. Though frame-first hulls require more maintenance, this is offset by the fact that they can be built and repaired faster and at less expense, and hull forms can be duplicated more easily. In addition, plank-on-frame construction requires less wood, which lowered the material cost of shipbuilding. Thus, the shift to frame-first construction was a technological revolution that resulted in a manufacturing one.
How the fore-and-aft lateen sail evolved is likewise unknown. All sails work by exploiting the difference in air pressure from one side to the other. With a square sail, wind blowing from astern creates high pressure behind the sail and low pressure in front; as the sail seeks to go toward the area of lower pressure it moves the hull forward. Whether the physics involved are understood, the basic idea is obvious to anyone who has stood in a strong breeze. The same principle applies to fore-and-aft sails (the lateen is but one of many types), which are cut to belly slightly in the direction away from the wind, thus allowing for an area of low pressure on the leeward side of the sail that exerts pull in that direction. The square sail is most effective when sailing directly downwind, but by swinging the yard forward and down, one can create a triangular shape not unlike a lateen. In its perfected form, a lateen enables a vessel to sail closer to the wind—at an angle of between sixty-six and forty-five degrees to the wind direction—compared to only about ninety degrees with a square sail. The lateen sail is especially well suited to ships of small to medium size—a capacity of thirty to sixty tons burden was typical of the period—because they require smaller crews than does a square sail for a vessel of comparable size. The lateen rig was suited to the times because it offered the mobility and speed necessary to avoid encounters with pirates or hostile states in an era of instability.
The adoption of the lateen occurred between the second century, the date of the oldest pictorial evidence, and the sixth century, after which there is no iconographic evidence of the square sail in the Mediterranean for several hundred years. It is commonly thought that the latter was abandoned completely until northern Europeans reintroduced it in the fourteenth century, but this is probably not the case. When artists began showing ships with square sails in the thirteenth century, they depicted rigging details similar to those employed by sailors of the ancient Mediterranean but unlike those found in northern Europe. This suggests that sailors continued to use the square sail, but only in vessels too small or otherwise insignificant to have attracted the attention of artists.
The Serçe Limani ship is revealing not only for what it shows us about developments in naval architecture and shipboard life; analysis of the associated finds also invites reconsideration of the nature of relations between Christians and Muslims. The glass cullet carried as ballast suggests that the ship was en route from a Syrian port with a local glassblowing industry to Constantinople, probably the foremost glassmaking center in the world. Apart from the cullet, the site yielded eighty pieces of intact cups and other glassware not intended for recycling. By themselves, these intact pieces would have constituted a significant contribution to the study of medieval glass. The painstaking recovery, recording, and categorization of nearly a million glass fragments allowed for the reconstruction of hundreds of beakers, dishes, bowls, ewers, jars, lamps, and other items, and in so doing revolutionized the study of medieval Islamic art.
Much of the rest of the cargo seems to have been perishable goods, although about ninety wine and oil amphorae were carried as ballast. More modest finds include copper pots, padlocks, adzes, drill bits and chisels, combs, chess pieces, and sixty-four spears and javelins. The provenance of the amphorae and weapons show that most of the ship’s complement, perhaps eleven people all told, were likely Hellenized Bulgarians from near Constantinople. Other personal effects include forty Byzantine copper coins and three gold Fatimid dinars. One of the nine anchors is stamped with Arabic letters, as is a glass weight (one of sixteen) that dates the wreck to no later than 1025. Another clue to th
e nature of cross-cultural relations beyond the seas comes from the nearly nine hundred decorated lead sinkers used for weighing down fishing lines or fishing nets. These were manufactured in a Byzantine workshop, probably in Constantinople, from lead mined in Iran.
The surprising variety of material goods in this thousand-year-old time capsule offers us a glimpse of the Mediterranean as an arena of collaborative exchange between Byzantine and Muslim merchants in the century before the Crusades, when the balance of power shifted sharply to the west. The material evidence for peaceful relations among merchants is corroborated by the contemporaneous formulation of maritime and commercial laws that at once respected and transcended the legal norms peculiar to Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, which allowed trade to flourish even where religious politics presented apparently insurmountable obstacles. The glass wreck is thus a multifaceted prism through which we can see the essential political, technological, and commercial developments that marked the progress from late antiquity to the early modern period.
The Eastern Roman Empire
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 28
